Understanding Parenting Where It Happens: Capturing Parents’ Everyday Responses to Toddler Distress from Naturalistic Audio Recordings

Parents' responses to children's negative emotions (an important aspect of emotion socialization) have significant implications for socioemotional development. Yet, much of what we know about how parents respond to their young children's distress is based on parental self-report or on observations of these processes in structured lab settings. We know surprisingly little about how parents respond to young children's negative emotions in everyday life, despite theoretical and empirical work suggesting 1) that parenting behaviors differ when measured in lab-based versus naturalistic settings, and 2) that the challenges the young children encounter in daily life offer crucial opportunities for emotion socialization and for the development of emotion regulation and other socioemotional competencies. Addressing this gap, this talk will report on data collected from twenty-five one-year-olds and their families using a wearable audio recording and processing technology called Language Environment Analysis (LENA). Although LENA is typically used in research on language development, I leverage LENA's ability to detect child distress vocalizations to characterize patterns of verbal and emotional communication between parents and toddlers, with particular attention to the strategies parents use when they respond (or don't respond) to toddler distress in everyday life.